Diamond Girl (37 page)

I’ve learned that lesbian relationships move super-fast. There is no first date, you hope they’ll call, and working up to sex scenario. It’s more a hook-up-once-and-you’re-married kind of deal. I know I hadn’t had to work up to sex with Michael, or even some other guys, but I would have liked the time to work up to it with Karmen, and that just wasn’t happening.

The way she saw it, and maybe she was going by the super-secret lesbian handbook, was that we had kissed, we were both single, I obviously wanted her around and that meant we were a couple and couples have sex.

Karmen was usually loaded on one thing or another and that night was no exception. Being drunk made her funny, but she could also turn mean on a dime. Her other drug of choice, Oxycontin, like Rush Limbaugh, usually made her mellow and happy, but it also made her horny as hell and I think we both thought it might help me feel the
same way, so a few nights before the fire I had let her crush up a few pills on my coffee table and joined her in snorting up a line.

I got sick, so sick the room spun and I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I threw up. When my knee’s locked, Karmen had caught me and eased me onto the couch. She was so gentle. She washed my face and ran to the refrigerator to get a new insulin pack for my pump, and when I cried and apologized, she kissed me and told me she loved me and that it was all okay, that she was with me.

For me her actions were a zillion times more seductive than the Oxycontin and if I didn’t want her in that way, I did want her to stay with me. It makes me feel pathetic, but after that I felt safe with her.

The first time we made love, I wasn’t a participant, I was just there, but after a few nights she started telling me what she wanted me to do, and I did it. It didn’t matter. I loved going to sleep with her and in the mornings I wasn’t alone, and Karmen was so much fun. She always planned our days. We’d go to Starbucks and shop, or we’d rent a room at the Mondrian so we could spend the day at their pool flirting with celebrities and showing off our new Chiarugi bikinis that we’d bought each other. That was this cool element Karmen introduced into our shopping. We’d be having iced cappuccinos by my pool and she’d lean forward looking at me with her big brown eyes. “Today is going to be robe day.”

That meant we’d head to Montana Avenue and split up, the goal being to buy each other the most perfect robe we could find, or it might be dress day, which I dreaded a little because Karmen’s taste in dresses ran to Gaultier, while I was more an Armani Privé kind of girl. But she was always so happy when I’d put on one of Gaultier’s bright-colored leather monstrosities she’d bought for me to go out dancing with her that I wore them.

As for what she did with my choices, I think she resold them. Karmen didn’t have an actual trust fund. She was on a weird kind of monthly allowance with her dad and sometimes she needed cash.

Karmen’s dad had a decent amount of money, a few hundred million dollars, and he’d made it in a short amount of time, but being a self-made guy, he ran kind of hot and cold as to how he handled his kid’s money. Sometimes he would be crazy generous, like with Karmen’s Maserati, but he didn’t buy any of them houses. When Karmen and her brothers turned twenty-one, he booted them off of his Bel Air estate and bought each of them condos.

Karmen’s was a small decent one bedroom on Charleville Boulevard in Beverly Hills. She had asked for one at the new Carlyle on Wilshire, but her dad had told her that if she wanted a three million dollar place, she should consider gainful employment. Karmen’s dad and she were pretty close, but he was no pushover and had already cut her off twice by the time she and I met. Her father was a big believer in rehab, like my parents, but in Karmen’s case it was necessary. Both times she had been cut off financially, she’d ended up at Promises in Malibu, but she had been so far gone that she had to go to detox over at Cedars first.

Obviously we were spending our time at my place where there was space and privacy, and besides, Diana was there. I liked to be able to see her and to go into her perfect nursery and give her the new outfits I bought her, and then have her brought out by her nanny so I could take pictures of her in them.

The night I burned the house down, Karmen and I had had our first fight.

She was pushing for us to go public. She wanted me to call up my parents and announce I was a lesbian so that, “You don’t have to keep living a lie”. There were so many reasons why that was a bad idea that I didn’t even know how to start explaining to her.

I gave her one of them. “I can’t. First of all, I don’t call my parents, they call me, and very seldom. When they do call, it’s usually because I fucked up. I don’t have a relationship with my parents. I’ve never had one with my mother and Daddy hates me since Vanity Fair, so no, I’m not going to call them up just to give them one more reason to be disappointed in me.”

She pushed out her lips and drained her scotch, her expression growing dark. “Okay Carey coward, Carey in the closet. If you won’t tell your family about us, then I want you to take me to Milan’s housewarming as your date.”

I kept my face smooth but I was dying inside.

Milan had finally made enough money to buy her very own movie star palace. She acted casually about it to everyone, but Christy and I knew what it meant to her and what she had given up to get there, little things like acceptance into the world we’d been born into and the chance to marry one of our own kind and have a family of her own. She was world famous and on show twenty-four seven, and running every minute of that time to hold her place because it’s slippery as hell at the top and, nowadays, being there usually means the kind of magazine covers screaming headlines you’d rather not have your name associated with, sweet little stories like 'Milan Marin in three way sex scandal with John Mayer.'

That hadn’t been true but it had cost
her an engagement to the only son of Greece’s richest families. His parents did not want that kind of daughter-in-law, or even one who was innocent but drew such sordid publicity. So for Milan, the house she’d bought herself was both a triumph and a validation that, though it might be lonely at the top, the view is fucking great.

The party she was arranging was going to be memorable, fabulous, over the top and beautiful, all the things she was. Milan had asked Christy and me to co-hostess with her. We were even going to dress alike, all three of us wearing black lace Missoni dresses with matching lace Valentino shoes. I had been looking forward to sharing that night with my oldest and bestest friend for months and there was Karmen staring at me and ready to rumble because she wanted me to turn Milan’s night of triumph into our ‘coming out’ party, literally.

I decided to choose Milan’s comfort, and my own, over Karmen’s agenda and I said no. She didn’t take it well. She screamed at me and told me we were “fucking done”. She deliberately poured her drink onto my beautiful couch, ruining the silk, and left in a huff. I watched her continuing her tantrum outside through my bedroom windows. I had immediately retreated there to cuddle with Petal following Karmen’s exit.  

She was acting like an asshole screeching her car in circles around my driveway, and then she floored it and peeled towards the gates. The
gates had a ten second delay on opening but, whether on purpose or because she was loaded, she smashed her half a million dollar car through them, taking out the Maserati’s front end and my hand-fired antique gates.

I turned away from the window, disgusted, and wondered how I would explain this to my staff in the morning, that is if they hadn’t all been watching the show from their own windows.

I shivered. My room suddenly seemed freezing to me and, at that moment, building a fire in my pretty white marble fireplace seemed like a great idea. I wanted the cheerful flames and the warmth. I had never built a fire before, but I thought if I threw in a stack of old Vogues I had and lit them, it would start the little pile of Birchwood logs that Mieko kept stocked in there for decoration.

The magazines smoldered but didn’t light and, acting like I was a girl scout on a mission - albeit a mentally handicapped one - I went downstairs and outside to the shed where I knew Harin kept cans of gas. The gas made the magazines flame all right. The fire blasted right out of its enclosure and began burning my carpet. In seconds the room was engulfed in smoke because, in addition to having just created a wildfire in my bedroom, I hadn’t known about fireplace flues, and as the investigators told me later, shaking their heads, mine had been closed. I grabbed Petal and screamed, running for the doorway and for Diana. Tanya, her night nanny, already had her and we scrambled down the stairs, all three of us screaming at the tops of our lungs.

It was Harin who called 911. Me? I called Karmen. I don’t know why I called her instead of, say, Milan. Maybe I thought she would feel a little responsible and sorry for upsetting me so much earlier, or maybe I just couldn’t face what I knew would be Milan’s reasonable questions of how the fire had started in the first place.

Karmen
came racing back in her damaged car and took over. She sent Lisa and Diana to stay at the Beverly Hilton after making a call to the hotel and telling them to charge everything the two of them would need to her father. Then, since Lisa had taken my Mercedes, Karmen led Petal and me to her car. She had to put on my seat belt because I couldn’t stop shaking. On the way down my drive, she rolled down the window and shouted out her cell number for Harin, telling him to call us later that day. That was the end of my house and, as Herbert coldly explained the next day, it was the end of me having any house for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 41

I’m sure Herbert knows the time difference between New York and California, and because of that I maybe should have been grateful that he stayed in his office for a whole hour before calling me on my cell at seven am California time. On the other hand, he might have just used that hour to sift through the previous night’s disaster and assemble as much bad news as possible for me before he picked up the phone.

Since Karmen and I hadn’t gotten to sleep until four that morning, it’s no surprise that he woke me up, or that I had a hard time understanding him. When my phone, which was still in the pocket of the robe I had been wearing when I had dropped face down onto Karmen’s bed, woke me, I glanced at the incoming name through slitted eyes - the horrible Herbert. I answered because dislike him though I might, I knew he was the person I was going to have to speak with if I wanted to begin damage control from the fire. I tried to say good morning but only managed a croak. My throat hurt from the smoke.

It was enough for him. “Yes, good morning, Carolyn, though, of course, I am afraid that this is far from being a good morning, as doubtless you will agree.”

I coughed in response.

“I will take that as a yes. I imagine that you are suffering some ill effects from the smoke earlier this morning. Carolyn, I must tell you I am at a loss as to where to begin. Already this morning I have received a distraught call from the city commissioner in Beverly Hills, who is an
old acquaintance of mine. She called me voicing concern over having an unsightly burned area in her jurisdiction. I informed her that we would be dealing with it, but one thing at a time.”

I managed to say thank you. Tired and sick as I was, I felt a little energy returning to my body with the knowledge that I wasn’t alone; that Herbert was on this.

His next words quickly clued me into how wrong I was. “You’re welcome, Carolyn. I only wish all of this morning’s calls were as simple as an overly-pushy code enforcer. You see, someone emailed your father pictures that are apparently all over the internet.”

“What pictures? Herbert, it was three o’clock in the fucking morning.” 

He cleared his throat. “Yes, Carolyn, I’m quite aware of what time it was, just as you should be aware that Los Angeles is a city filled with those unfortunate camera types who lurk about at all hours and who apparently all have police and fire band radios in their vehicles. Now ...”

“Paparazzi, Herbert, they’re called paparazzi, so I’m guessing what you are saying is that some of them took pictures of the fire last night and me leaving the house, God, Daddy must be so worried. Listen, let me just call him right now and I’ll call you right ba
...”

“There is no need to call your father, Carolyn. He has already shared his thoughts in this matter.”

“I don’t care, I want to talk to Daddy.” I started crying and felt Karmen’s hand stroking my hair. I turned to look at her. She was awake, watching me with concerned eyes, I gestured at the phone to explain my tears and she made a 'fuck you' gesture which made me laugh through my tears.

Herbert heard it. “Is this funny to you, Carolyn?”

“No Herbert, sorry, it’s just … never mind. So Daddy wants you to speak to me for him. How unusual.” 

“Carolyn, please don’t be snide. I can assure you that you will find speaking to me preferable to having this conversation with your father. If for one moment you can think of someone besides yourself, try to imagine his feelings on seeing his disheveled daughter driving off with some strange young woman in a wrecked car while his only grandchild is left alone with a nanny.”

I went cold. In the nightmare of leaving the house, I hadn’t thought about how it would look, I mean how it was. That was bad, I knew, but …